Kablamo – Week 1

Once again this journal is late. It can’t be helped. Most of last week gave me precious little to do and I was not feeling very well anyway. I came in for the minimum about of time and no longer.

Orientation was fun. It’s hard not to enjoy hearing James talk about comics for three hours. Though I can’t say I enjoyed the comics he himself made. Too gross for me. And given it’s me that’s saying a lot. I am looking forward to reading more stuff in this medium as research though.

Our first exercise was to cut and paste things out of books and stick them onto sheet of A1 paper to make an impromptu, college comic.

For reasons I can’t explain, possibly relating to some forgotten childhood trauma, I hate even the thought of cutting pasting. Part of me wanted to duck out and runaway. Say that I was ill. I certainly didn’t feel all that well. But i resolved to go ahead and at least do what was asked of me.

When I had ten random pieces I looked through them to see what story I could tell with them. I settled on a story about a man who is no longer happy in his family and leaves them to try and find happiness with others. After years of fruitless searching Jesus comes to him in a vision and tells him to visit a mysterious house. There he meets a beautiful woman who shows him that he was meant to be a musician. and he finds contentment.

I did the bare minimum that was needed. After cutting and pasting all the images in order I added in some text and drew some panel borders. I could have added in my own drawings. But I did not feel invested enough. And I don’t even know what I would have put there anyway.

Anyhow. Here’s the comic

Not great. But James seemed to like it well enough.

 

After that I had to come up with an idea for a real comic. Written and drawn by yours truly.

Having been feeling  deep sense of loss recently my mind turned to a line from Watership Down The Animated Series, “Kehaar not sure he can fly. Heart so heavy”. In this line Kehaar the gull is morning a long dead love before taking off on a mission. I felt a lot like Kehaar. So my mind returned, as it so often does, to Watership Down. That was where I would take my inspiration from. Watership Down, home.

I started drawing rabbits and writing bits of text.  And soon I had three heroes. Strype, White Tail, and Ghost.

I knew I had made a choice I could get invested in.

It was clear from my crude, ugly drawings and my mind wondering to creating the three rabbits staring into a black void that apparently leads to the centre of the earth that this would be fantasy horror. My favourite genre.

I  drew some more  and soon I had a story. This would be about my three rabbits fighting three demon rabbits in forms of dead loved ones.

I had my premise. So I then wrote down a story. I think it’s good one. All my love of horror, fantasy, and animal stories deeply present in it.

 

For my research I looked through my Marvel collections to see how long a good done-in-one story is. While the results varied they averaged out to 20 pages. Considering the page number for this project has to be a multiple of 4 twenty seems like a good number.

On Friday I started writing a script. Given I’d never written a script before James is still forcing me to push boundaries. How ever I did genuinely become ill and had to leave early.

I tried writing a bit more over the weekend. But I still wasn’t able to get much done.

As of this I have two versions of the script done. One that breaks down what happens on each page and one for the dialogue on each page. I’d like to go through it one more time to figure out the panel arrangements. It’s a task that scares me. But I’m just going have to start winging it and figure out the panel arrangement as I draw. If I don’t get started now I’m not going to until it’s too late. There’s a lot I’d like to do. Finalise the character designs. Do some thumbnails. Study real world rabbits. But there’s no time.

My plan is to draw the comic twice. Once with simple pencil drawings. That way if I choke I’ll still have something to show. Then draw over the existing comic with either coloured pencils or better, stronger black and white pencil drawings. Hopefully this will give me a little time to improve the drawings and designs of the rabbits.

 

Wish me luck